[Fic] "A History of Handcrafts (Because a Sweater Equals Love)" -- Star Trek: AOS

[edenfalling]

Remix reveal day! I wrote three stories this year: A History of Handcrafts (Because a Sweater Equals Love) and In Foreign Tongues (Been All Over You) for melayneseahawk, and Postcards from Naxos (You Don't Have To Go Home, But You Can't Stay Here) for sour_idealist.

I am going to talk about each in a separate post.

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A History of Handcrafts (Because a Sweater Equals Love): 3,200 words, April 2011. Love doesn't have to be difficult: all you need to do is reach out to your friends. A story in three parts and many knitting projects. Contains background Amanda/Sarek, Kirk/Gaila, and Spock/Uhura.

Remixed from Spock's Sweater, a drabble by MelayneSeahawk.

This is the one I call my unexpected remix.

I offered to write Star Trek: AOS mostly on a whim, and was not at all expecting to get assigned to anyone in that fandom. I assumed I'd get Harry Potter, Naruto, or Narnia, since those are the fandoms I actually qualified in, and Naruto and Narnia are also notably smaller fandoms (in Remix terms, at least -- Naruto utterly crushes Star Trek: AOS if you go by number of stories on ff.net, but Remix tends to skew away from anime and manga fandoms). Anyway, once I recovered from my surprise, I read through MelayneSeahawk's archive and was promptly attacked by a vicious, tenacious, novel-length plotbunny for the story of Gaila's life from birth through old age.

Unfortunately, that required absurd amounts of world-building and wasn't even really a remix, per se, so a few days later I poked through MelayneSeahawk's archive again, absent-mindedly looking for something a bit simpler. And before I knew what had happened, I'd written over a thousand words about knitting.

Here's the thing: I don't knit. The sum total of my experience with knitting is a one-hour lesson at a YRUU con in high school, after which I made two-thirds of a fancy patterned pot-holder, went home, set the project aside for two weeks, and when I decided to finish it, realized I'd completely forgotten how to knit. And I never touched the needles again. So what I was doing writing a story entirely built around knitting, I still have no idea.

Initially it had no plot. Also, because I had no outline -- I wrote the entire story in a state of mild disbelief, and consequently never quite admitted I was writing it -- I wrote and discarded several wrong turns and alternate versions. Eventually I did find a thematic through-line, though there still isn't much of a plot qua plot.

theodosia21, cherokee1, and 7scimitarroll graciously agreed to beta-read for me, which resulted in a few grammar fixes and a weight off my mind when they told me that I hadn't lost the forest for the trees: the theme did come through.

I am sorry for turning a drabble that was (as I later learned) intended as slash into a story with so much background het, but I am not in the least sorry for focusing on the power of family and platonic friendship, because the world always needs more gen fic and friendship is awesome, amen, the end.

Comments

[hungrytiger11.livejournal.com]

was promptly attacked by a vicious, tenacious, novel-length plotbunny for the story of Gaila's life from birth through old age.

Please tell me you might yet write this though!

the world always needs more gen fic and friendship

So. True.

[edenfalling]

I kind of did write the first third -- childhood through meeting Uhura -- in a horribly compressed form, simply by stitching together all my failed attempts at writing a remix for "Talented Tongue." I wlil post that in a day or two. But I have no idea when or if I'll get around to expanding it so it can breathe the way it should.